Recent advances in portable computing have made mobile electronic devices, such as laptops, palmtops, mobile phones, smart phones, multimedia phones, portable media players, global positioning system (GPS) units, mobile gaming systems, etc., quite popular. Many users carry a device almost everywhere they go and use their device for a variety of purposes, including making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages and emails, navigation (e.g., using maps and/or a GPS receiver), purchasing items in stores (e.g., using contactless payment systems), sharing photos, listening to music or watching videos, and/or accessing the Internet (e.g., to look up information). A user's mobile device can be carried or worn and can perform a variety of smart functions in addition to traditional functions formerly implemented by a single application-specific device.
Mobile devices can have applications that access a variety of content, such as email and websites, photos, streaming audio/video, social media, and the like. Some applications can periodically receive notifications from services that new content is available. Such a service can “push” content to an application on a mobile device or send a notification to the application that new content is available. When the notification is received at the application, the application can then retrieve the new content. These services (e.g., update/upgrade services, news services, web blog services, podcast services, social networking services, or the like) allow users of mobile devices to interact with content wherever they may be.
The increase in the use of mobile devices magnifies the complexity of how users interact with content on their devices. One problem with this is that each one of a user's devices can have different capabilities, either in hardware or in software. Thus, users typically have to adapt to how they interact with the content from device to device. Furthermore, as mobile devices become smaller and integrate more functionality, new and innovative ways are needed to facilitate connectivity of mobile devices.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide improved coordinating and handling of how devices connect to communications networks.